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Title: Dada: Art and Anti-Art (World of Art)
ISBN: 0500200394
Author:
Hans Richter
Publicate Date: 1997-04
Publish: 1997-04
List Price: $18.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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1: Dada Lives!
Dada wasn't really an art movement. It was an intellectual cry for help, decrying the degradation of art in a mass society. As such, it embodied an idea - the revolt against form - that lives on to this day even though the movement died quickly largely because its governing idea ran out of oxygen to fuel its flame.
Hans Richter, a dadaist himself, was an eyewitness to the movement's creation in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire and he writes with the authority of an insider, conveying the excitement and tension of the moment but does little more than catalog the Dada moments, artifacts and personalities. The book does raise the question, was dada merely a protest against the atrocity of modern warfare or an actual movement? Richter delineates the various flare-ups of Dada culture in Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Paris and New York but fails to answer that question. And I have others. Were there ideas that animated these artists? Did they cluster around a particular aspect of dada revolt? If dada was just a protest, how come dada lives on so powerful as a cultural idea, retreaded and re-packaged but never expanded or exceeded? Only towards the end does Richter attempt sum up dada and that is only because he wants to elevate it above pop art and the other neo-dada movements that emerged in the sixties when his book was published and dada had new relevance.
Still, there are great prints throughout the book and Mr. Richter knew many of the personalities that with a word or sentence he can summon to life in way no outsider could.
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2: it is not only possible to achieve something beautiful, but very easy
This is one of the most important books of my life, and I know for a fact that I am far from alone in this. Richter taught me that it is not only possible to achieve something beautiful, but very easy; you simply have to actually want to. It is the first book I recommend, lend, or give to a friend; Bradley Chriss keeps extra copies on hand for those who need to read it; Warren Fry and David Beris Edwards have both been deeply inspired by it. What I was officially `taught' concerning Dada, and what I took for accurate for many years, was essentially that it was the cheeky use of the Readymade, and was basically synonymous with Marcel Duchamp. When I finally realised that there may have been something to it that I had missed, a particular image recurred to me, one that had been flipped past for not more than five seconds in a slideshow several years earlier, a man inside a large awkward cardboard costume, looking like a cross between the Tin Man, a stovepipe, and a lobster, with a very earnest, very direct, and at the same time very lost look on his face. It was most certainly not Marcel Duchamp. And I decided that there must be something else, and that I needed to track it down. Going to the bookstore, Chance--which that day vouchsafed to me its devious kind of (Anti-)trustworthiness--led me to Hans Richter. Richter was, in many ways, the most grounded of the core Dada group; among the least `absurd', the least polemic, and most importantly in his later role as scribe of the movement, the least histrionic and least given to post-mortem internecine strife. He was also, and perhaps for these very reasons, perhaps the nicest. The result is that Dada: Art and Anti-Art is not, like Ball's history, one of otherworldly mysticism; like Huelsenbeck's, one of political upheaval and ideological combat; like Tzara's version, one of impersonal destruction of all personal and social guarantors of subjective comfort; like Duchamp's, one of formal innovation or `artistic' concerns. Richter's history is the history of a group of friends, some of whom had never personally met, who galvanized that friendship into a force that profoundly transformed hundreds of lives, made all of those other histories thinkable and achievable, and in the process established the groundwork for a programme of joyous, deep-seated social revolt upon which we are still attempting build new ways of living; and, as Richter shows, they did this simply by actually caring. The most essential thing to be gleaned from Art and Anti-Art is not anything unique to Dada, it is the realisation that the Institution has somehow managed to dupe us all into thinking that we need it; Richter, in his generous, humble, unassuming way, taught me that a `movement' is not something that one assembles like an army of ready-made Heroes to launch on the grand battleground of Art History; it is the experience of a few dedicated friends who love nothing more than what they are doing, finding other dedicated friends who all make each other into something none could have imagined on their own, until one day they all look around, realise with astonishment what has come into existence through them, and get back to what they love to do together, as that intangible thing that has evoked itself between them continues to grow.
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3: Important
Takes a good look at the Dada artist's and their work. The author was involved in Dada and made many crucial Dada works. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is that it talks about the relationships between the people involved in Dada, but doesn't stray to far from what is important...the original works.
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4: Jackdaws Love My Big Sphinx Of Quartz
dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada mulberry dada dada dada dada dada dada
....lymph node....
dad dad dad dad dad dad dad dad dad
+a +a +a +a +a +a +a +a +a
merz
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5: You Are There
Hans Richter lived on the fringes of Zurich's Dada movement, and here offers a personal narrative of the Dada movement and its eventual successor, Surrealism. This was the first book I'd ever read on Dada and I found it quite sufficient -- all the personalities are introduced, and their motivations and how they came together are revealed. Richter is best in the earliest sections, while discussing the birth of the influential Cabaret Voltaire and how the First World War helped amplify Dada's influence in Europe. The book peters out a bit in later chapters, but is still a detailed look at the subject. If you are simply seeking an understanding of the movement, this book is a fast and entertaining read.
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